By Robert Wenzel
The socialist Bernie Sanders has won the Nevada Democratic caucuses in a landslide. He has the momentum and is polling strong across most of the country. This is not good.
Political strategists will tell you that this is good for President Trump because he will sweep the November elections if Sanders is the Democratic nominee. We'll see.
But if Sanders gets the Democratic nomination and then loses to Trump, this will not be the end of the socialist advance.
Trump is the perfect foil for second-hand dealers in socialism. The bully buffoon President Trump, painted as a capitalist (which he is not) by the socialist propagandists, will continue to trigger gains in followers for the socialists as long as he is in power.
I saw this right out of the gate when Trump was elected in 2016.
I wrote as my follow-up within 48 hours of the Trump victory:
Heading into the election, I felt that for strategic reasons Hillary Clinton was the best alternative for libertarians. Not because she is good on many issues, she is not, but because she would come with a ready-made opposition that would listen to libertarian arguments against her.
It would have been a great opportunity to reach out to Trump supporters and spread the libertarian message. That opportunity is now gone with the Trump victory. Trump supporters are rabid, they will likely follow him down almost any hell hole.
These people are not going to listen to our arguments for smaller government. Their man is in power.
There will be opposition to Trump but it will be coming from the left, not the Trump right.
The left is all about expanding the state. Thus, it will be very difficult to reach out to these people and present state shrinking anti-Trump ideas. They are a perfect target for the socialists.
Indeed, the protest that occurred in New York City last night, where thousands turned out, was launched by a socialist group, the Socialist Alternative. The socialists are going to experience a boom in followers under Trump.Now, things are worse.
The socialists are thinking "takeover the system" strategy. They are getting serious about gaining control and with good reason.
Micah Uetricht, the managing editor of the socialist Jacobin magazine and Meagan Day, a staff writer at Jacobin, have an essay up at Salon. It is titled, Why Bernie Sanders is just the beginning of an American turn to the left, and reads in part:
A new socialist movement is cohering in the US, thanks in large part to the popular class politics of Bernie Sanders...
Chris Maisano describes the democratic road as a strategy that pursues "election of a left government (likely over multiple contested elections) mandated to carry out a fundamental transformation of the political economy, coordinated with a movement from below to build new institutions and organizations of popular power in society."This is extremely aggressive thinking. They are going for the capitalist jugular.
Eric Blanc offers a similar formulation. Eventually, after the Left has won significant gains at the ballot box and in civil society, the capitalist class will take the gloves off against socialists and do whatever it takes to destroy our movement. We'll need to fight back. The democratic road to socialism seeks not to elide this confrontation, but to make it possible. To replace capitalism with socialism, writes Blanc, "(a) socialists should fight to win a socialist universal suffrage electoral majority in government/parliament and (b) socialists must expect that serious anti-capitalist change will necessarily require extra-parliamentary mass action like a general strike and a revolution to defeat the inevitable sabotage and resistance of the ruling class."
Though socialists are likely to be met with capitalist resistance that at times will turn violent, "revolution" doesn't necessitate mass bloodshed — and though we believe in self-defense, we certainly do not advocate violent means. A future socialist government, the late Marxist thinker Ralph Miliband wrote, "has only one major resource, namely its popular support." To pull off a revolution in our circumstances, that popular support would need to be mobilized both inside and outside of government...
We've seen that left elected officials can not only win office, but can widen the scope of political possibility even when they're only a small minority of legislators in a given elected body. For a socialist movement that's been in the wilderness for at least half a century, these new developments are crucial. But it's not enough for socialists to be a tiny minority in the House of Representatives, or run inspiring but failed campaigns for president, or hold only 10 percent of seats in a city council. Our aims have to be much bigger than that. We don't want simply to fight against some other political majority—we want to become the majority, and believe we can get there.
I know of no such similar libertarian/old school conservative style strategizing. Too many have been swept up in the Trump whirlwind. They have kept silent about the many steps Trump has taken in directions that move us away from freedom. At most, they occasionally utter that Trump has been a disappointment.
But this is not the time to give Trump a break on anything. Any move he makes that is not in the direction of liberty should be aggressively pointed out and shouted down.
It needs to be made clear that Trump is not a capitalist and that there is a group that is as far away from Trump as it is from socialists.
The socialists are coming. If the stars align just right, they will eventually defeat the Trump movement.
The only hope we have is to make it loud and clear at every opportunity we have that there is an alternative to Trump that is not socialist.
If we are not successful, the socialists could very well take our freedoms. They are plotting right now to do just that.
I repeat. The socialists are coming, the socialists are coming.
Robert Wenzel is Editor & Publisher of EconomicPolicyJournal.comand Target Liberty. He also writes EPJ Daily Alert and is author of The Fed Flunks: My Speech at the New York Federal Reserve Bankand most recently Foundations of Private Property Society Theory: Anarchism for the Civilized Person Follow him on twitter:@wenzeleconomics and on LinkedIn. His youtube series is here: Robert Wenzel Talks Economics. More about Wenzel here.
Even if Trump wins in 2020 there's no obvious successor with a Trump-style fanatical base of support. We'd be back to Mitt Romney types who play the role of the Washington Generals in losing to the Democrats.
ReplyDeleteCivil war, hopefully peaceful
ReplyDelete"The only hope we have is to make it loud and clear at every opportunity we have that there is an alternative to Trump that is not socialist."
ReplyDelete-- I'm not sure what "alternative" you're envisioning. Right now, all the focus is on the voting booth, and libertarianism doesn't have a lot to offer in that forum. Ideally, we'd convince people not to vote, and to abandon the political system in many other ways, so that the state is sapped of its support. But this is a long-term strategy that is not going to defeat any particular presidential candidate.
"If we are not successful, the socialists could very well take our freedoms. They are plotting right now to do just that."
-- It's the state that has taken and will continue to take our freedoms, not any particular group that is in control of the state (the "right" hasn't been shy about expanding the state). Who controls the state might impact which freedoms are destroyed and at what pace, but our fight should be against the state, not against any particular incarnation of it.
The American Jacobins might think that they are taking on capitalism, but that's not what we have now, and I don't think that libertarians should spend their time trying to convince people to elect faux capitalists. That is essentially conceding the legitimacy and necessity of the state.
Libertarians should not get caught up in the four-year presidential cycle, but, rather, should continue to work on eroding support for the whole system: the presidency, Congress, the courts, the military and police, the bureaucracy, etc. (and then down at the level of state governments too).
The socialists are coming and it is a concern but a quick read of some of the comments at the Salon article reveal that many of there readers are not in agreement with the article.
ReplyDeletePolls late last year show gen M's and Z's at about 50%/50% capitalism to socialism with a flat trend for socialism. Older generations show capitalism above 60% and both socialism and capitalism trending up at about the same rate.
Not ideal but not a disaster.
If a strong libertarian can get on a debate stage with Sanders and Trump.... that would be marketing gold.
ReplyDeleteAmerican socialists are beta soyboys and haplophobic feminists. When SHTF they will be exterminated within a week. The people who have their heads on straight have been preparing for this for years. It is not a fluke coincidence that every dem win in the booths results in spike of firearms sales.
ReplyDeleteLibertarians have so much to offer. I did support Ron Paul in 2012 and pretty much stayed home until Trump came along. If that ugly cunt Hillary won RW would have been in gulag by now. Trump has served a purpose since some people do recognize that the federal government does not serve them but special interest in both parties. This is where RW has an obvious blind spot due to his TDS.
ReplyDeleteI think any future secession movements will owe their existence to Trump. And is what is more libertarian than secession?